Wendy Larner

The Spaces and Subjects of a Globalising Economy: A Situated Exploration of Method

In this paper we aspire to develop a situated method in order to interrogate the spaces and subjects of the globalising economy. In our brief review of the social science literatures on economic globalisation, we identify a promising intellectual convergence around the theme of imaginaries. We develop an argument that global imaginaries involve both discourses and practices that are, in turn, constitutive of new spaces and subjects. We identify the particular significance of calculative practices such as benchmarking and allied techniques in constituting global imaginaries in the New Zealand context. We then demonstrate how our method might inform a case study of the globalising retail-banking sector by revealing multiple spaces and subjects. In analysing the emergence of new economic spaces and subjectivities in this way, our aim is to give situated content to the concept of global imaginaries and to make visible the constitutive power of governing practices.

Neo-liberalizing Spaces and Subjectivities: Reinventing New Zealand Universities

Consistent with an ongoing experience of neo-liberal experimentation, tertiary sector reform in New Zealand is being driven by the ambition to re-create universities in a qualitatively new form. We argue that, through calculative practices, New Zealand universities are being positioned and are positioning themselves in the neo-liberalizing spaces of university education. In turn, these calculative practices are giving rise to new views of the university and altering the behaviours of staff and students. We draw attention not only to the constitutive power of calculative practices, but also to the political contestations that surround them. Our conclusion is that, because of these contestations, the spaces and subjectivities of the neo-liberalizing university are multiple and contradictory. The attempted reinvention of New Zealand universities will have varied effects and give rise to multiple political forms.

C-change? Geographies of crisis

It is now widely accepted that this is a period of crisis, although commentators differ as to the appropriate comparisons. This article begins by emphasizing that this is not the first time that social scientists have invoked claims of crisis and qualitative change, then examines geographical accounts of neoliberalism to see how crisis is analysed in this literature. It asks if the geographical frameworks and modes of analysis that emerged are adequate to analyse the current period, identifying the significance of five Cs; namely the ‘credit crunch’, climate change, China and the other ‘BRIC’ economies, crusades or the resurgence of religion, and cyborgism. The article concludes that in order to examine the changing terrains of the five Cs, both individually and collectively, it will be important to carefully consider the processes through which heterogeneous elements are being configured into new political assemblages, the mutations and transformations that happen as an integral part of these redeployments, and the objects and subjects that are being constituted in these new governmental terrains.

Hitching a Ride on the Tiger's Back: Globalisation and Spatial Imaginaries in New Zealand

In this paper I develop a genealogy of globalisation in New Zealand informed by the neo-Foucauldian literature on governmentality. My claim is that globalisation involves a shift-in the object of economic governance away from the national economy and towards the circuits of global capital. This shift is associated with a change in spatial imaginaries. Through an analysis of three key arenas—social policy, foreign direct investment, and immigration—I show that policies and programmes, designed to fulfil these new political ambitions, aim to articulate individuals, sectors, and regions into the economic flows and networks of the Pacific Rim. In this regard, globalisation can be usefully understood as a political strategy that promotes a new understanding of the means and ends of economic governance.

Globalization, cultural economy, and not-so-global cities: the New Zealand designer fashion industry

Research on so-called ‘global cities’ dominates the existing literature on globalization, fashion, and cities. In this we paper analyze the recent rise of a designer fashion industry in Auckland, New Zealand. The designer fashion industry has emerged as an unlikely success story as the New Zealand economy has globalized. Together with other creative industries, designer fashion is seen as an industry that can revamp New Zealands international image and in doing so foster additional foreign investment. As the industry has succeeded, Auckland has disproportionately benefited, with sustained industry agglomeration and increasing infrastructural development in this city. However, the symbolic benefits of the designer fashion industry have proved more elusive. We show that the New Zealand designer fashion industry borrows symbolic capital from the global cities of designer fashion. We argue that this borrowing of symbolic capital underlines the need to think more carefully about the geographical specificity of the material, political, and symbolic processes associated with globalization and the cultural economy.

Governing Globalisation: The New Zealand Call Centre Attraction Initiative

It is well established that globalisation is associated with changing governmental conceptions of economic space. Whereas previously firms, regions, and economic sectors were understood as discrete parts of a national economy, they are now constituted as nodes in global economic flows and networks. However, less attention has been paid to the forms of expertise and knowledge practices through which the global economy has been constituted as the focus of economic governance. Through a case study of the New Zealand Call Centre Attraction Initiative, this paper draws from the governmentality literature to show new forms of economic governance can be conceptualised as an assemblage of spaces, subjects, strategies, and numbers. It is argued that far from being a ‘new reality’ globalisation is a governmental process in the making.

The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis

Introduction: The Point Is To Change It: Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright 1 Now and Then: Michael J. Watts 2 The Idea of Socialism: From 1968 to the Present-day Crisis: Hugo Radice 3 The Revolutionary Imperative: Neil Smith 4 To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations: Tania Murray Li 5 Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents: Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner 6 D/developments after the Meltdown: Gillian Hart 7 Is the Globalization Consensus Dead?: Robert Wade 8 The Uses of Neoliberalism: James Ferguson 9 Crisis, Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism, the Left and the Future of Capitalism: Noel Castree 10 Money Games: Currencies and Power in the Contemporary World Economy: John Agnew 11 Pre-Black Futures: Katharyne Mitchell 12 The Shape of Capitalism to Come: Paul Cammack 13 Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World: Nancy Fraser 14 The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the 21st Century: Erik Swyngedouw 15 An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene: J. K. Gibson-Graham and Gerda Roelvink Index

Globalization, the `new economy' and working women: Theorizing from the New Zealand designer fashion industry

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between womens positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world womens entry into the labour force.

Neoliberalism, Mike Moore, and the WTO

Mike Moore is a working-class boy from rural New Zealand who subsequently became Director General of the World Trade Organization. This paper uses his experiences and understanding to analyse the embodied forms in which neoliberalism travelled from nation-state to global settings. It shows that neoliberal discourses and techniques do not always emerge in the sites we assume, travel in the forms we expect, or move in the directions we anticipate. By analysing Moore’s understanding of relationships between the global economy and nation-states, the reforms he made to WTO processes following the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the implications these reforms had for broader conceptions of global spaces and subjects, the paper contributes to a conceptual argument that neoliberalism can be usefully understood as an assemblage which comes together in much more disjunctive ways than is often recognised, and that it should be theorised and researched as such.

WHO NEEDS CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES INDEED

This paper interrogates the concept of cultural intermediaries through an analysis of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, an industry composed of small networked enterprises which offer a wide range of educational, aesthetic and business services. The authors argue that ‘cultural intermediaries’ can no longer be thought of in terms of particular occupations, spaces or events. Instead, cultural mediation is more productively understood as a function of the multiplicity of activities and relationships organised around the new economic spaces of the fashion industry, all of which are subject to the exigencies of capital accumulation. Moreover, the proliferating activities that comprise the New Zealand fashion industry are profoundly gendered, both in terms of womens numerical dominance and the gendered skills and attributes that these activities mobilise. These women are all producing, mediating and consuming fashion, making up the complex economic and cultural networks which comprise the fashion industry and also supporting the industry through their own fashion consumption and the creation of a broader fashionable sensibility. It is in this context that the authors ask ‘Who needs cultural intermediaries indeed?’